Saturday, November 08, 2014

Every week my neighbors and I engage in a sort of vehicular ballet, moving cars from one side of the street to the other in order to avoid a street sweeping ticket. The most irritating part is that the sweeper doesn't do a damn thing. The vehicle zooms past my house, stirs up dirt from my gutter, and shoots it out into the street. While the sweeper is doing it's dirty business, meter maids and meter manservants (the male version of a maid is a "manservant"-I looked it up) drive through the neighborhood handing out $50 tickets like they're going out of style.

Growing up, I never had a street sweeper come by my house. Every week my father would go out and dig a pathway through waist-high trash so that I could walk to school. When I blew out the candles on my birthday cake, I didn't wish for a Teddy Ruxpin, I wished for the "trash fairy" to come and sweep away the filth from my front yard. Now that I'm an adult, however, I have realized that there are things worse than trash. And those things are dirty rotten street sweepers.